"Line Gang Four, pilot. The Corvina Star is clear of the berth, and all lines are in the water. You can come out from behind the shed now. Watch your footing, there's a light pole down. Thank your men for me, Alcide. Thank them for moving when I asked."
At Gate Two, on the floor of the shack, with his shirt soaked through and rain still blowing in the window, Wade Toups heard it.
The squall line took forty minutes to blow through the Gulfline Terminal, and by the time the rain slackened from sheets to ordinary heavy rain, and then to a steady drizzle, and the wind dropped from a howl to a hard, gusty breeze that smelled clean and cool and almost like autumn for the first time that year, it was a quarter to eight, and a lifted gray Silverado with one cracked side mirror was idling outside the arm at Gate Two, going the wrong way, out.
Wade had gotten up off the floor. He had closed the window, finally, and mopped the worst of the water off the counter with a roll of paper towels, and he had tried to call Ernest Fuselier again and gotten voicemail again, and he had sat on his stool with the radio in front of him on the counter, listening to the channel go back to its ordinary business: Twyla asking for damage reports, a forklift driver saying the roof was leaking in the export shed, Alcide saying they were taping off the light pole. He had not heard her voice again. The ship had gone to marine channels, where his radio didn't reach.
He slid the window open. Beau was sitting in the cab of the truck with the dome light on. He was soaked to the skin, his orange vest dark with water, his hair plastered flat on his forehead where the hard hat had been, and his face was the color of skim milk. He was holding the steering wheel with both hands at ten and two, like a kid in driver's ed.
"Alcide sent me home," Beau said. "Sent all of us home. Said the gang's done for tonight." He looked straight ahead through the windshield, not at his father. "Daddy, I was leaning on it. The bollard. Number two. I had my hip right up against it, I was fixing to throw the eye off the second she gave the word, and that lady come on the radio and said get behind the shed, and Alcide was yelling, and I thought, man, that's overkill, and I almost didn't. I almost stayed. Tommy grabbed me by the vest." He swallowed. "I seen where that line went. It took the light pole off at the base like it was a toothpick. It went right where I was."
Wade could not say anything. He reached out through the window, across the gap between the shack and the truck, and put his hand on his son's shoulder, on the wet orange vest, and held on.
"Twyla told me," Beau said finally. He still wasn't looking at him. "On the way out. She flagged me down in the lot. She said the pilot sat at Gate Two for ten minutes. She said you had her card and wouldn't give it back." He turned his head then, and looked at his father, and Wade saw that his son's eyes were red, and not only from the rain. "Why?"
"The reader's busted," Wade said. "Since August. And Fuselier said, after the crane..." He stopped. He made himself stop. "That's not why."